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Drought concerns for Portland area evaporate, but remain in southern Oregon

rainybridge.jpeg

Cars, cyclists and pedestrians head east across the Hawthorne Bridge during a rainstorm. Portland is seeing more rain than average for the month of March and the trend will likely continue for the next few days.
(John Killen/The Oregonian)

Two months back, officials at the National Weather Service were concerned about the possibility of a drought this summer in the Portland area.

How things change.

As of 5:30 p.m. Friday, a record 1.41 inches had fallen since midnight at Portland International Airport, with more expected.

That means we are up to at least 6.57 inches so far in March, more than double the normal amount to this date, which is of 3.26 inches. And that total could climb higher overnight, according to Andy Bryant, a hydrologist with weather service in Portland.

Bryant said the totals were boosted Friday afternoon when a squall line brought a narrow band of showers to the airport. He said it was especially impressive between 3 and 4 p.m., when .43 inches poured from the sky, helping break the previous mark of 1.25 inches for the day, which has stood since 1943.

Bryant said is wasn’t likely that all of the Portland area got that wet but he estimated that most of the metro region probably got anywhere from .75 to 1.0 inch, at least.

And the moisture wasn’t restricted to rain, either. Even though Portland was relatively warm on Friday, things were cool enough on Mount Hood that Mount Hood Meadows and Timberline Ski area both got a boost in their snowpack. Bryant said that Meadows received about 10 new inches in the past 24 hours while Timberline probably got 10 to 12. He said that Timberline has received about 27 new inches of snow in the last three days.

Bryant also said that the total snowpack for the Mount Hood is also in decent shape, and is currently at least 75 percent of normal after a slow start in December and January.

“March has been pretty wet,” Bryant said Friday. “We’re running 150 to 175 percent of average in Northwest Oregon” for the month of March.

“It’s kind of a similar scale to last month, too, so it’s definitely taken a lot of the edge off our drought concerns for this part of the state.”

The same can’t be said about southern Oregon or some other parts of the state, he said. While some rain has finally come to southern Oregon in the last couple of months, there has been very little snow in the mountains “and the rivers really depend on (snow) for sustained river flows.”

Bryant said snowpack is as low as 25 percent of normal in the southern Oregon Cascades and only about 55 percent in the Willamette Basin.

As for the next few days in Portland?

“The heaviest rain is today (Friday) and then a lot of showers through the weekend,” Bryant said. “But it will be a lot more variable. Some places might not get a whole lot and some could get half an inch and there’s some potential for some thunderstorms, too.”

Still, there would have to be a lot more rain over the next three days to break the record for March, however. That mark is 7.89 inches, set in 2012.